Last week we did a soft release of our new Cron jobs tool, and it’s amazing, no really, if anyone is going to call a Cron job tool cool, it better be ours. And like most of our control panel features, it has goodies for the novices as well as for advanced users. The new tool is built with Symfony2 in the backend and AngularJS in the front-end. This is proving to be a real winning combination for us and is slowly taking over our control panel.

The Cron tool is built into the Cron app located in the Applications section of our control panel. Cron enables users to schedule jobs (commands or shell scripts) to run periodically at certain times or dates. To be quite frank it’s somewhat a pain to manage manually so we built a tool to easily schedule, configure, maintain and monitor all your cron jobs for you. Some of the features include:

Easy setup with pre-configured commands like:

backing up MySQL

Running scheduled Symfony (2.x and 1.x) commands

Hitting a specific URL

Executing custom commands

Easy Scheduling

Advanced setup

Create Cron variables to repurpose in your jobs

Suppress logging per job

Edit Cron files using the GUI

See the results of previous jobs (job history) to determine if they are running or not

Test your commands before scheduling your jobs

Built in cheat sheet for advanced scheduling

Easily see when the next run is scheduled

In addition to user jobs, the Cron tool also allows you to manage system jobs.

A Cron job is one of those things that you don’t need until you need it, and when you do you just want it to work. One of the coolest features is the ability to test your job before scheduling it. It also logs a history of all the times your job ran outputting error or success codes, so if it failed for any reason, you will know when and why it failed.

For current ServerGrove customers, check it out in the Applications section of the control panel. If you are not yet a ServerGrove customer, here are some screenshots:

Easily add new Cron jobs

The tool comes with a built in cheat sheet.

Short message informing you of the next time a specific job will run.

This is a screen grab of the job history showing the latest executions. In this case the job never failed, but if it were to fail, it would show up in red in this list.

This is the screen grab of the result of a failed test. I entered a bogus command and it know it.

You can also edit the configuration file which is not recommended unless you really know your stuff.

Here is a screen grab of system jobs. Clicking on them allows you to edit them. Also not recommended unless you know your stuff.